Brooklyn College Art MFA Blog

Monday, October 3, 2011

vizkult is heading up the initiative to publish The Occupy Wall Street Journal for the occupation of Wall Street. The idea was proposed to the NYC General AssemblyArts & Culture Committee meeting this past Monday Sept. 26th. Be on the look out for "The Occupy Wall Street Journal". If anyone wants to help out with future i issues contact x_vizkult.org The content will be along the same taste as the previous vizKult projects, Good Morning Baghdad and BCuz Newz.

Friday, July 15, 2011

The Index Festival will transpire in August 2011 in New York City. Our aim is to bring together individuals and groups who cognitively engage media culture. We welcome the interdisciplinary, shared and accessible culture we are coming to live in as a result of digital technology. Our mission is to focus on projects that blur the vocabulary of science and art, dissect the media that describes our culture today, and to disseminate out from the [cultural] institution, and further into the multi textural international landscape.

The ‘memory palace’ is an ancient memorization technique, one which exploits the fact that our visual/spatial memory far outperforms our verbal and numerical memory. To memorize a long text or string of numbers, you can use a remembered architectural space (like a childhood home) as a mental storehouse for the new information. You can transform each to-be-remembered item into a dramatic, eccentric, unforgettable image, mentally insert these images into specific locations within the remembered space, and later ‘find’ it right where you left it.

This show resembles a memory palace, in that it is idiosyncratic rather than unified, and endeavors to make a virtue of this heterogeneity. The differences between images, experiences, personalities are what make them visible, meaningful, and memorable. We can’t help but categorize artworks, but when we do we inevitably obscure what most compels us about them. It is particularity--not generality--that arrests our attention.

The idiosyncrasy of visual expression renders art a perpetually uneasy collaborator with academe, since schools necessarily prioritize rational, categorical thought. But the title of this exhibition provides an analogy for how this collaboration can function productively; the memory palace technique requires both wildly varied imagery and a framework to anchor and link that imagery. In an MFA program, the school supplies the quantitative structures that order the experience--the space, the time, the schedules, the deadlines--and the students furnish the bureaucratic boxes with color, with strangeness, with life.

When the palace fragments, when the menagerie vanishes and the walls of the studios are once again whitewashed clean, these sundry art practices will likely find themselves in more isolated rooms. But while at Brooklyn College, this group of artists built a home from their differences, a place to which they can always return in their mind's eye.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

"The crisis of urbanism is worsening. The construction of neighborhoods, old and new, is obviously at variance with established modes of behavior, and all the more so with the new ways of life we seek. As a result, we are surrounded by a dull and sterile environment."

"In old neighborhoods, the streets have degenerated into highways, and the leisure is commercialized and adulterated by tourism. Social relations there become impossible. Newly built neighborhoods have only two themes, which govern everything: traffic circulation and household comfort. They are the meager expressions of bourgeois happiness and lack any concern for play" - Constant Nieuwenhuis, International situationiste 3 (December 1959) pp. 37-40

RE-INSCRIBING THE CITY:Unitary Urbanism today.

Judson Memorial Church (balcony) 55 Washington Square South New York City, NY

In the late 50s up until about the end of the 60s a group of artist known as the Lettrist/Situationist International (LI/SI) made a desperate attempt to re-inscribe the city so that it's inhabitants could break free from the bleak urban routine of work and consumption. During this period several strategies were developed under the name of Unitary Urbanism. This panel reflects on the historical importance of these strategies in order to critically examine how they relate to their own work and the possible uses within society today.

Ethan Spigland received an M.F.A. from the Graduate Film Program at New York University, and a maitrise from the University of Paris VIII under the supervision of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. He has made numerous films and media works including: Luminosity Porosity, based on the work of architect Steven Holl, Elevator Moods, featured in the Sundance Film Festival, and The Strange Case of Balthazar Hyppolite, which won the Gold Medal in the Student Academy Awards.

Adeola Enigbokan. Artist, researcher, writer and teacher based in New York City. Her work is about the experience of living in cities today. Her work has been presented in several diverse venues: at the ConfluxCity Festival, Anthology Film Archive in New York, The Royal Institute for British Architects, London and the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. She teaches courses in Urban Studies, Media Studies, Sociology and Anthropology at several universities in New York City. Currently she is completing a doctorate in Environmental Psychology at the City University of New York. Website: http://archivingthecity.com

Dillon de Give started Lah an annual walking project that commemorates the spirit of Hal, a coyote who appeared in Central Park in 2006 and died shortly after being captured by authorities. Lah illustrates how a coyote might find its way into Manhattan with a reverse human journey out of the city: a hike retracing a potential coyote-like path through greenspaces. Citing examples of juvenile coyotes that have made long dispersal trips, the walk averages around 50-60 miles. Website:implausibot.com

Blake Morris uses walking as a core way to engage ideas and space, and also to create community. His last project was a yearlong exploration of the public works of Robert Moses, called The [Robert Moses] Walk Project, which resulted in over 50 walks throughout the NYC area. He also created the [untitled] Walk Project, and is working on Walking up an Appetite, an exploration of walking, food and technology. Currently his work can be seen at the Superfront gallery in LA, as part of Detroit: A Brooklyn Case Study.

The Walk Study Group is New York City walking group formed by Blake Morris and Dillon De Give. Each week case studies of strategic walking practice and theory in art, politics, ecology, and philosophy, are combined with specific short walks. The course will result in an understanding both theoretical and practical and culminates with a group walk constructed by the class for the public. Website: http://www.implausibot.com/walkstudy

William Hou Je Bek Wilfried is a 'culture hacker' who develops generative psychogeography. Inspired by concepts of drift (dérive) from Romanticism and, later, the Situationists around Guy Debord, Wilfried uses algorithmic routes to explore a city in non-intuitive ways. Hou Je Bek organizes dérives, where people walk through a city by taking computer code as a guideline, using the body as a means to perform software. Website: http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com

Antonio Serna is an artist living and working in New York. With art as his tool, he is constantly comparing and contrasting the human construct of progress with the animal instinct of survival. The results of which have been exhibited in New York, Spain, Mexico, The Netherlands, and Texas. Antonio has also taught and lectured at Parsons School of Design, St. Johns University, and at Brooklyn College as a teaching fellow. Outside of his studio, Antonio Serna enjoys rummaging through the social anthropology of art and visual culture. Website: http://www.antonioserna.com

Optional Texts:

October issue 79: Guy Debord and the Internationale situationniste [PDF 7.8mb]A Special Issue. Guest editor, Thomas F McDonough. Winter 1997table of contents: Rereading Debord, Rereading the Situationists - Thomas F. McDonoughWhy Art Can't Kill the Situationist International - T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-SmithAsgerJorn's Avant-Garde Archives - Claire GilmanAngels of Purity - Vincent KaufmannLefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview - Kristin Ross (1983)Situationist Texts on Visual Culture and Urbanism: A Selection:Guy Debord - One More Try If You Want to Be Situationists (The S.I. in and against Decomposition) Guy Debord - Theses on the Cultural Revolution Michèl Bernstein - In Praise of Pinot-GallizioConstant Nieuwenhuis - Extracts from Letters to the Situationist InternationalEditorial Notes: Absence and Its CostumersEditorial Notes: The Sense of Decay in ArtConstant Nieuwenhuis - A Different City for a Different LifeEditorial Notes: Critique of UrbanismEditorial Notes: Once Again, on DecompositionRaoul Vaneigem - Comments Against UrbanismEditorial Notes: The Avant-Garde of PresenceThéo Frey - Perspectives for a Generation

About vizKlut: This panel is part of vizKult, a loose band of artist and writers exploring the 'cult of vision'. This group explores the ways in which the visual operates in our society and the mechanism which manufacture, shape, and control the world around us. In this sense VizKult's emphasis is on the process rather than the products of our contemporary visual condition. http://www.vizkult.org

Monday, October 18, 2010

Thank you so much to those who came to the first Alum Night! More than 25 people stopped by over the course of the evening, including some delightful alumni significant others. Hare Field Road is a comfortable place, not too hipster, not too divey, and not too loud to talk.

We're going to try it again, this time on a Thursday, so that current first years may be able to attend. Please join us for Brooklyn College Alum Night, an unofficial, casual gathering of BC MFA Art alums. Drink and converse. Share tips and techniques. Network, or just gossip about the art world.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

BROOKLYN COLLEGE • CITY COLLEGE • HUNTER COLLEGE • LEHMAN COLLEGE • QUEENS COLLEGE

Current CUNY MFA Students from the boroughs will project their work while knocking 'em back. Open to alumni, faculty, and friends of the CUNY MFA system. Unlike last years event where we hung our work, this year your work will be projected.**

**IF YOU ARE A CURRENT MFA STUDENT, PLS send 10 jpgs to brklynartmfa@gmail.com by SATURDAY MIDNIGHT - Deadline Extented!.

FORMAT:* email subject line: "CUNY MFA Meet-up 2010 SLIDES"* include first and last name & website URL if you have one.* size: 1024px x 768px at 72dpi (we dont need super hi-rez)* use this format for titling:

Friday, April 23, 2010

June-July, Works From the Balcony, an alternative project space in Bucharest will be opening its doors to the public for the first time this June in parallel with the Bucharest Biennial 4. Located in district 2 of Bucharest the space is easily accessible sizing at 1000 square meters of raw space in an early 1900’s villa.

Here we will be hosting a series of events and exhibitions encouraging immediate public access to cross-cultural values in the contemporary arts and culture.

DAWN CLEMENTSClements’ endeavor to draw what’s around her often draws her into very large-scale work; the first work I saw 10 years ago was a 78-foot long drawing done during a residency in Middlebury, VT. Her work usually develops in a serendipitous way—she responds to what she sees and doesn’t know the end point until she reaches it. She may begin working on a very modest scale but the work often ends up many times larger as she glues pieces of paper to the edges of the working drawing where she decides to continue drawing. The wrinkles and tears that develop as a result of her process are the record of a very active, performative drawing practice. (above: Boiler, ink on paper. 2010)

CHERYL DONEGANCheryl Donegan defines a generation of artists, many of whom are women, who first engaged in a new conceptual art practice in the early 1990s. Her work integrates the time-based, gestural forms of performance and video with forms such as painting, drawing, and installation. Provocative and irreverent, her body-based, performative video works put a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art-making, art history, and pop culture. (above: Untitled, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 2009)

PATRICIA TREIBPatricia Treib’s works were recently exhibited in “Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and The Ready-Made Gesture” at the Kitchen. A solo presentation of her work was exhibited at John Connelly Presents in 2008. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Andrew Kreps and Guild & Greyshkul in New York, and Sutton Lane in Paris. She was awarded a studio residency through the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in 2007. Treib lives and works in Brooklyn. (above: Icons, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 2008)

Brooklyn College Art MFA Blog

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